In which our hero talks about video game ads he has scanned from old comic books.

Friday, June 14, 2013

"Superman: The Mysterious Mr. Mist", 1996.

We have previously seen evidence of the axiom that there has never been a good game made using the Superman license. To be fair, even the movies have a spotty track record, and the comics themselves aren't everyone's cup of tea. A new movie, Man of Steel, is at the threshold, possibly to yield dubious games of its own. Here we visit a previous stop on Supe's checkered past in the world of games:

CD-ROM Comic Books Burstonto the Scene!

Featuring animation from the classic 1960's Saturday Morning cartoons

Click and Panels Spring to Life with Animation!

Works on
Windows & Macintosh

Multimedia Action in Every Panel!

Experience your favorite DC Comics Super Heroes in comic books with a multimedia twist. Every panel reveals action video, hidden animated "hot spots," or plot clues that bring the story to life. Enter a world of adventure that unfolds before you in the most entertaining comic books you'll ever read with a mouse!

Inverse Ink was a crew of multimedia miscreants who drank a little too deep from the intermedia well. In 1995 they managed to squeak out two prototype "issues" of their CD-rom multimedia comic book Reflux (not a word with traditionally positive connotations), and by the following year they'd managed to obtain access to some b-side material from the Warner Bros. vaults, to work their dubious magic on their dusty cast-offs. They were given the lucrative Superman and Batman properties to work with, and, the other side of the coin, stuck with Superbox and Aquaman as well.

Four years later the folks behind Cyberswine (starting out the year after these flops) would try a similar arrangement, "The Multipath Adventures of Superman: Menace of Metallo", to similar effect. It may be the case that we just haven't found the right approach to enrich multimedia comic books yet (me, I like Jason Shiga's Meanwhile, though that's hardly superhero stuffs), or it may be the case that all such ventures are fundamentally doomed. Freedom Force is probably the best possible marriage of genre, form and gameplay fun. But I digress.